Tag Archives: Tangent Element

As a working video editor, I’m at my desk and on my computer all day. So when I get home I want my personal workstation to feel as powerful as possible and having the right tools to support that experience are paramount.

I’m talking workstation accessories. I’ve put together a short list based on my personal experience. Some are well known, while some are slightly under the radar. Either way, they all make my editing life easier and more productive.

They make my home-based workstation feel like a full-fledged professional edit suite.

Wacom Intuos Pro Medium
In my work as an offline editor, I started to have some wrist pain when I used a mouse in conjunction with my keyboard. That is when I decided to jump head first into using a Wacom tablet. Within two weeks, all of my pain went away and I felt that I had way more control over drawing objects and shapes. I specifically noticed more precision when working inside of apps like Adobe’s After Effects and Photoshop when drawing accurate lines and shapes with bezier handles.

In addition, you can program minimal macros on the express keys on the side of the tablet. While the newest Wacom Intuos Pro Medium tablet costs a cool $349.95, it will pay for itself with increased efficiency and, in my experience, less wrist pain.

Genelec 8010A Studio Monitors
One workstation accessory that will blow you away is a great set of studio monitors. Genelec is known for making some great studio monitors and the 8010A are a set I wish I could get. These monitors are small — around 8-inches tall by 4-inches deep and 4-inches wide — but they put out some serious power at 96dBs.

Don’t be fooled by their small appearance; they are a great complement to any serious video and audio power user. They connect via XLR, so you may need to get some converters if you are going straight out of your station, without runing through a mixer. These speakers are priced at $295 each; they aren’t cheap, but they are another important accessory that will further turn your bay into a professional suite.

Tangent Element & Blackmagic Resolve Color Correction Panels
If you work in color correction, or aspire to color correct, color correction panels are a must. They not only make it easier for you to work in apps like Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve, but they free your mind from worrying about where certain things are and let your fingers do the talking. It is incredibly liberating to use color correction panels when doing a color grade — it feels like you have another arm you can use to work.

The entire set of Tangent Element Panels costs over $3,300, but if you are just getting started, the Tangent Element Tk (just the trackballs) can be had for a little over $1,100. What’s nice about the Tangent panels is that they work with multiple apps, including Adobe Premiere, FilmLight Baselight, etc. But if you know you are only going to be using Resolve, the Resolve Micro or Mini panels are a great deal at under $1,000 and $3,000, respectively.

Logitech G13 Advanced Gameboard
This one might sound a bit odd at first, but once you do some research you will see that many professional editors use these types of pads to program macros of multiple button pushes or common tasks. Essentially, this is a macro pad that has 25 programmable keys as well as a thumb controlled joystick. It’s a really intriguing piece of hardware that might be able to take place of your mouse in conjunction with your keyboard. It is competitively priced at only $79.99 and, with a little Internet research on liftgammagain.com, you can even find forums of user’s custom mappings.

Logickeyboard Backlit Keyboard
Obviously, the keyboard is one of the most used workstation accessories. One difficulty is trying to work with one in a dark room. Well, Logickeyboard has a dimmable backlit keyboard series for apps like Resolve and Avid Media Composer.

In addition to being backlit, they also have two powered USB 2.0 ports that really come in handy. These retail for around $140, so they are a little pricey for a keyboard but, take it from me, they will really polish that edit suite.

OWC USB-C Dock
With ports on Mac-based systems being stripped away, a good USB-C dock is a great extension to have in your edit suite. OWC offers a Mini-DisplayPort or HDMI-equipped version in the colors that match your MacBook Pro, if you have one.

In addition, you get five USB 3.1-compatible ports — including two of those being a high-powered charging port and a USB type C port — a Gig-E port, front facing SD card reader, combo audio in/out port and Mini-DisplayPort or HDMI port. These retail for under $150.

Brady Betzel is an Emmy-nominated online editor at Margarita Mix in Hollywood, working on Life Below Zero and Cutthroat Kitchen. You can email Brady at bradybetzel@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @allbetzroff.

Lately, it feels like a lot of the specializations in post production are becoming generalized and given to the “editor.” One of the hats that the editor now wears is that of color corrector — I’m not saying we are tasked with color grading an entire film, but we are asked to make things warmer or cooler or to add saturation.

With the standard Wacom tablet, keyboard and/or mouse combo, it can get a little tedious when color correcting — in Adobe Premiere, Blackmagic Resolve or Avid Media Composer/Symphony — without specialized color correction panels like the Baselight Blackboard, Resolve Advanced, Nucoda Precision, Avid Artist Color or even Tangent’s Element. In addition, those specialized panels run between $1,000 per piece to upwards of $30,000, leaving many people to fend for themselves using a mouse.

While color correcting with a mouse isn’t always horrible, once you use a proper color correction panel, you will always feel like you are missing a vital tool. But don’t worry! Tangent has released a new color correction panel that is not only affordable and compatible with many of today’s popular coloring and nonlinear editing apps, but is also extremely portable: the Tangent Ripple.

For this review I am covering how the Tangent Ripple works inside of Premiere Pro CC 2015.3, Filmlight’s Baselight Media Composer/Symphony plug-in and Resolve 12.5.

One thing I always found intimidating about color correction and grading apps like Resolve was the abundance of options to correct or grade an image. The Tangent Ripple represents the very basic first steps in the color correction pipeline: color balancing using lift, gamma, gain (or shadows, midtones and highlights) and exposure/contrast correction. I am way over-simplifying these first few steps but these are what the Ripple specializes in.

You’ve probably heard of the Tangent Element Panels, which go way beyond the basics — if you start to love grading with the Tangent Ripple or the Element-VS app, the Element set should be your next step. It retails for around $3,500, or a little below as a set (you can purchase the Element panels individually for cheaper, but the set is worth it). The Tangent Ripple retails for only $350.

Basic Color Correction
If you are an offline editor who wants to add life to your footage quickly, basic color correction is where you will be concentrating, and the Ripple is a tool you need to purchase. Whether you color correct your footage for cuts that go to a network executive, or you are the editor and finisher on a project and want to give your footage the finishing touch, you should check out what a little contrast, saturation and exposure correction can do.

You can find some great basic color correcting tutorials on YouTube, Lynda.com and color correction-focused sites like MixingLight.com. On YouTube, Casey Faris has some quick and succinct color correction tutorials, check him out here. Ripple Training also has some quick Resolve-focused tips posted somewhat weekly by Alexis Van Hurkman.

When you open the Tangent Ripple box you get an instruction manual, the Ripple, three track balls and some carrying pouches to keep it all protected. The Ripple has a five-foot USB cable hardwired into it, but the track balls are separate and do not lock into place. If you were to ask a Ripple user to tell you the serial number on the bottom of the Ripple, most likely they will turn it over, dropping all the trackballs. Obviously, this could wreck the trackballs and/or injure someone, so don’t do it, but you get my point.

The Ripple itself is very simple in layout: three trackballs, three dials above the trackballs, “A” and “B” buttons and revert buttons next to the dials. That is it! If you are looking for more than that, you should take a look at the Element panels.

After you plug in the Ripple to an open USB port, you probably should download the Tangent Hub software. This will also install the Tangent Mapper, which allows you to customize your buttons in apps like Premiere Pro. Unfortunately, Resolve and the Media Composer Baselight plug-in do not allow for customization, but when you install the software you get a nice HUD that signals what service each Ripple button and knob does in the software you are using.

If you are like me and your first intro into the wonderful world of color correction in an NLE was Avid Symphony, you might have also encountered the Avid Artist Color panel, which is very similar in functionality: three balls and a couple of knobs. Unfortunately, I found that the Artist Color never really worked like it should within Symphony. Here is a bit of interesting news: while you can’t use the Ripple in the native Symphony color corrector, you can use external panels in the Baselight Avid plug-in! Finally a solution! It is really, really responsive to the Tangent Ripple too! The Ripple really does work great inside of a Media Composer plug-in.

The Ripple was very responsive, much more than what I’ve experienced with the Avid Artist Color panel. As I mentioned earlier, the Ripple will accomplish the basics of color correcting — you can fix color balance issues and adjust exposure. It does a few things well, and that is it. To my surprise, when I added a shape (a mask used in color correction) in Baselight, I was able to adjust the size, points and position of the shape using the Ripple. In the curves dialogue I was able to add, move and adjust points. Not only does Baselight change the game for powerful, in-Avid color correction, but it is a tool like the Ripple that puts color correction within any editor’s grasp. I was really shocked at how well it worked.

When using the Ripple in Resolve you get what Resolve wants to give you. The Ripple is great for basic corrections inside of Resolve, but if you want to dive further into the awesomeness of color correction, you are going to want to invest in the Tangent Element panels.

With the Ripple inside of Resolve, you get the basic lift, gamma and gain controls along with the color wheels, a bypass button and reset buttons for each control. The “A” button doesn’t do anything, which is kind of funny to me. Unlike the Baselight Avid plug-in, you cannot adjust shapes, or do much else with the Ripple panel other than the basics.

Element-Vs
Another option that took me by surprise was Tangent iOS and the Android app Element-Vs. I expected this app to really underwhelm me but I was wrong. Element-Vs acts as an extension of your Ripple — based off the Tangent Element panels. But keep in mind, it’s still an app and there is nothing comparable to the tactile feeling and response you get from a panel like the Ripple or Elements. Nonetheless, I did use the Element-Vs app on an iPad Mini and it was surprisingly great.

It is a bit high priced for an app, coming in at around $100, but I was able to get a really great response when cycling through the different Element “panels,” leading me to think that the Ripple and Element-Vs app combo is a real contender for the prosumer colorist. At a total of $450 ($350 for the Ripple and $100 for the Element-Vs app), you are in the same ballpark as a colorist who has a $3,000-plus set of panels.

As I said earlier, the Element panels have a great tactile feel and feedback that, at the moment, is hard to compare to an app, but this combo isn’t as shabby as I thought it would be. A welcome surprise was that the installation and connection were pretty simple too.

Premiere Pro
The last app I wanted to test was Premiere Pro CC. Recently, Adobe added external color panel support in version 2015.3 or above. In fact, Premiere has the most functionality and map-ability out of all the apps I tested — it was an eye-opening experience for me. When I first started using the Lumetri color correction tools inside of Premiere I was a little bewildered and lost as the set-up was different from what I was used to in other color correction apps.

I stuck to basic color corrections inside of Premiere, and would export an XML or flat QuickTime file to do more work inside of Resolve. Using the Ripple with Premiere changed how I felt about the Lumetri color correction features. When you open Premiere Pro CC 2015.3 along with the Tangent Mapper, the top row of tabs opens up. You can customize not only the standard functions of the Ripple within each Lumetri panel, like Basic, Creative, Curves, Color Wheels, HSL Secondaries and Vignette, but you can also create an alternate set of functions when you press the “A” button.

In my opinion, the best button press for the Ripple is the “B” button, which cycles you through the Lumetri panels. In the panel Vignette, the Ripple gives you options like Vignette Amount, Vignette Midpoint, feather and Vignette Roundness.

As a side note, one complaint I have about the Ripple is that there isn’t a dedicated “bypass” button. I know that each app has different button designations and that Tangent wants to keep the Ripple as simple as possible, but many people constantly toggle the bypass function.

Not all hope is lost, however. Inside of Premiere, if you hold the “A” button for alternate mapping and hit the “B” button, you will toggle the bypass off and on. While editing in Premiere, I used the Ripple to do color adjustments even when the Lumetri panel wasn’t on screen. I could cycle through the different Lumetri tabs, make adjustments and continue to edit using keyboard functions fast — an awesome feature both Tangent and Adobe should be promoting more, in my opinion.

It seems Tangent worked very closely with Adobe when creating the Ripple. Maybe it is just a coincidence, but it really feels like this is the Adobe Premiere Pro CC Tangent Ripple. Of course, you can also use the Element-Vs app in conjunction with the Ripple, but in Premiere I would say you don’t need it. The Ripple takes care of almost everything for you.

One drawback I noticed when using the Ripple and Element-Vs inside of Premiere Pro was a small delay when compared to using these inside of Resolve and Baselight’s Media Composer plug-in. Not a huge delay, but a slight hesitation — nothing that would make me not buy the Ripple, but something you should know.

Summing Up
Overall, I really love the Ripple color correction panel from Tangent. At $350, there is nothing better. The Ripple feels like it was created for editors looking to dive deep into Premiere’s Lumetri color controls and allows you to be more creative because of it.

Physically, the Ripple has a lighter and more plastic-type of feel than its Element Tk panel brother, but it still works great. If you need something light and compact, the Ripple is a great addition to your Starbuck’s-based color correction set-up.

I do wish there was a little more space between the trackballs and the rotary dials. When using the dials, I kept nudging the trackballs and sometimes I didn’t even realize what had happened. However, since the Ripple is made to be compact, lightweight, mobile and priced to beat every other panel on the market, I can forgive this.

It feels like Tangent worked really hard to make the Ripple feel like a natural extension of your keyboard. I know I sound like a broken record, but saving time makes me money, and the Tangent Ripple color correction panel saves me time. If you are an editor that has to color correct and grade dailies, an assistant editor looking to up their color correction game or just an all-around post production ninja who dabbles in different areas of expertise, the Tangent Ripple is the next tool you need to buy.

Brady Betzel is an online editor at Margarita Mix in Hollywood, working on Life Below Zero and Cutthroat Kitchen. You can email Brady at bradybetzel@gmail.com. Earlier this year, Brady was nominated for an Emmy for his work on Disney’s Unforgettable Christmas Celebration.

This working editor is impressed with the color correction tool’s NLE offerings.

By Brady Betzel

If you’re looking for a nonlinear editor alternative to Adobe Premiere, Apple FCP X or Avid Media Composer you must check out Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve 12 Studio. The best part about the continuing evolution of Resolve is that Blackmagic has been adding NLE functionality to its color correction software, instead of building an editor from the ground up.

In terms of editing systems, Avid Media Composer has been in my life from the very first day I started working in television. At school we edited on Final Cut Pro 7 and Adobe Premiere, but once I hit the big time it was all Media Composer all the time. Now, of course, that is changing with Adobe Premiere Pro projects popping up more and more.

Many of today’s editors want to work on an NLE offering the latest and greatest features, such as resolution independence, wide codec support, occasional VFX integration and the all-mighty color correction. So that leaves us with Adobe, Avid and the newest player to the NLE game, Blackmagic and its Resolve product.

Resolve’s multicam capabilities.

Adobe realizes how important color is to an editor’s workflow and has added color correction inside of Premiere by incorporating Lumetri Color. In fact, Adobe’s After Effects also features Lumetri Color. But even with these new additions some are still wanting more. This is where Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve 12 is making its move into the nonlinear editing world.

Inside Resolve 12
With Version 12, Blackmagic has reinvented its internal NLE environment to catch the eye of any editor looking to make a change from their current editing system. In this review I’m looking at Resolve 12 from an editor’s perspective, not a colorist’s. Some NLEs say you can stay inside of their environment from offline to online, but oftentimes that’s not the case.

I think you will really like what Blackmagic is doing in Resolve 12 Studio — you will also like their visual effects and compositing app Fusion, which recently released its Version 8 public beta.

Blackmagic offers two versions of Resolve: Resolve Studio and Resolve. They also offer the DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panel, which retails for $29,995. Resolve Studio sells for $995, while plain Resolve is free, and you get a lot of horsepower for free. If $30K is too pricey for your budget, remember that a lot of high-end colorists use the Tangent Element coloring panels — they retail for under $3,500. (You can check out my review of the Tangent Element panels here.) Color panels will change the way you look at color correcting. Coloring by mouse or tablet compared to panels is like playing baseball with one arm tied behind your back.

The Resolve Panel

The differences between Resolve Studio and Resolve is Studio’s realtime noise reduction and motion blur parameters using CUDA and OpenGL GPUs and stereoscopic 3D grading. The free version has mastering limitations; very limited GPU and Red Rocket support; lack of collaborative teamwork-based features; lack of remote grading; limitation of proxy generation to the UHD frame size; limit of project frame sizes to UHD; and a lack in ability to render the Sony XAVC codec. But keep in mind that even the free Resolve will support the Tangent Element panel if you have it.

Powering It Up
Technically, you should have a pretty beefy workstation at your disposal to run Resolve, especially if you want to take advantage of the enhanced GPU processing and realtime playback of high-resolution sources. One common debate question is, “Do I transcode to a mezzanine format or stay native?” Personally, I like to transcode to a mezzanine format like DNxHD or ProRes, however with systems becoming the powerhouses they are today that need is slowly dying. Even though Resolve can chew through different native codecs such as AVCHD it will definitely be to your advantage to find a common intraframe codec such as ProRes 4444, Cineform or DNxHD/HR as opposed to an interframe codec such as XDCAM, which is very processor-intensive and can slow your system down during edit.

A very thorough explanation can be found over at Sareesh Sudhakaran’s website: http://wolfcrow.com/blog/intra-frame-vs-inter-frame-compression. The minimum requirements for Resolve on a Mac are OS X 10.10.3 Yosemite and 16GB of system memory, although 8GB is the minimum supported. For a Windows system you need Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit with SP1 with 16GB of system memory, although 8GB is the minimum supported as well.

In addition, you will need up-to-date drivers from your GPU, and if I was you a high-end GPU (or two or three) with as much memory as possible. Many people report a couple prosumer Nvidia 980 Ti cards to be a great value if you aren’t able to jump up to the Quadro family of GPUs. In addition AMD and Intel GPUs are supported.

Let’s be real, you should either have a sweet X99 system with as much RAM as you can afford or something on the level of an HP z840 or recent Mac Pro to run smoothly. You will also want an SSD boot drive and a RAID (SSD if possible) to get the most out of your editing and color experience with minimal lag, especially when adding Power Windows, motion blur and grain.

The Interface
My immediate reaction to Resolve’s updated interface is that it looks and feels like an amalgamation of FCP X and Adobe Premiere CC 2015. If you like the way Adobe separates out their assembly, color and NLE interfaces then you will be right at home with Resolve’s Media, Edit, Color, and Deliver keys. In the timeline you will see a similar look to FCP X with rounded corners and an otherwise intriguing graphical user interface. I’m not going to lie, it felt a little shiny at first but coming from Media Composer almost every NLE interface will feel shiny and new. So the questions is: will it perform on the same level as a tried and true behemoth like Avid’s Media Composer?

Testing the NLE
There are a few key functions that I test on every NLE I jump into: trimming, multicam editing and media management. For the most part, every NLE can insert edit, assemble edit and replace an edit, but most can’t replicate Avid’s trimming and media management functionality.

Jumping into trim mode there are your standard ripple, overwrite, slip and slide trims. You can perform that multitrack asymmetric trim to pull time between those huge acts and even one type of trim that I really wish Avid would steal — the ability to trim durations of multiple clips simultaneously. The best way I can describe this is when you are building credits and you need to shorten them all by one frame. Typically, you could go in card by card and remove one frame from each card until you are done. In Resolve 12, you can trim multiple clips at the same time and in the same direction, i.e. trim one frame from every credit in a sequence simultaneously. It’s really a remarkable addition to a trim workflow, not to mention a time saver.

Second on my checklist for running an NLE is its ability to work smoothly with multiple camera angles in a grouped set of footage, sometimes referred to as groups. One of my personal pet peeves with Media Composer is the inability to change a group after it has been created (and by pet peeve I mean bane of my existence when I was assistant editor and a 12-hour group was off by one or two frames… but I digress.)

Luckily, Blackmagic has given us a solution inside of Resolve. After a group has been created, you can step “inside” of that group, add angles, add a final mix and even change sync. All of these changes ripple through the edits; it’s very impressive. My two favorite features in Resolve’s new multi group abilities are mixing frame rates within a group and auto syncing of audio and video based on waveforms. If you’ve ever needed Red Giant’s PluralEyes because there was no jam sync timecode on footage you received, then you will feel right at home inside of Resolve’s auto sync. Plus you can adjust the group after it’s been created! I love this… a lot.

Media management

Last on my list is media management. I have pretty high expectations when it comes to media management because I was an assistant editor for a little over four years working on Media Composer, and for the most part that system’s media management works rock solid — if you need to vent about how I am wrong you can tweet me @allbetzroff) — especially when used in conjunction with an Avid Shared Storage product like the Unity or ISIS. What I realize is that while Avid’s way of media organization is a little bit antiquated, it is reliable.

So what I’ve really started to embrace within the last year is metadata and I now recognize just how valuable it is with NLEs like FCP X and now Resolve. Metadata is only valuable, however, if someone actually enters it and enters it correctly.

If in Resolve you have properly kept your metadata game extremely up to date you can quickly and efficiently organize your media using Smart Bins. Smart Bins are incredible if they are set up properly; you can apply certain metadata filtering criteria to different bins such as interview shots, or have shots from a particular date to automatically populate. This is a huge time saver for assistant editors and editors without assistant editors; another feature I really love.

I couldn’t cover everything within Resolve in this space, but believe me when I tell you that the features not covered are just as great as the ones I have covered. In addition to the newly updated audio engine under the hood, there is a command to decompose a nested timeline in place — think of a nested sequence that you want to revisit but you don’t have to find the original and recut it into the sequence — one click and magically your nested sequence is un-nested. There is also compatibility with Open VFX, such as GenArts Sapphire and Boris FX BCC Continuum Complete. There is remote rendering and grading, plus many, many more features. One of my favorite resources is the Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve 12 manual written by Alexis Van Hurkman (@Hurkman on Twitter), who also wrote Color Correction Handbook: Professional Techniques for Video and Cinema, a phenomenal book on color correction techniques widely regarded as the manual for color correction.

Summing Up
In the end I can’t begin to touch on the power of Resolve 12 in this relatively small review; it’s constantly being updated! The latest 12.2 update includes compatibility with plug-ins like New Blue Titler from Media Composer via an AAF! I didn’t even get a chance to mention Resolve’s integration of Bezier curve adjustments to transitions and keyframe-able movements.

If you are looking for an upgrade in your color correction experience, you need to download the free version immediately. If you’re an editor and have never taken Resolve for a test drive, now is the time. With features like greatly improved dynamic trimming to the extremely useful and easy to set up Smart Bins to the new 3D tracker and foreground color matching, Resolve is quickly overtaking the color and NLE market in one solid and useful package.